The first thing you notice when you step into Allucquère Rosanne
Stone's cramped, cluttered office at the University of Texas at Austin is the
incredible range of interests she pursues. One look around the room and it's
clear she takes the multi part of her work as seriously as the media. The walls
are covered with posters promoting events she has been involved with -
cyberspace conferences, architectural symposia, dance performances, art
exhibitions, concerts, film festivals, and feminist gatherings. UFO stories
clipped from tabloid newspapers compete for wall space with images culled from
Tank Girl comics, and quirky pop-cultural artifacts litter every available
centimeter of horizontal surface area. Sandy (as she's known in all but the
most formal contexts) directs the University of Texas ACTLab,
the radio-television-film department's interactive multimedia laboratory.
Right above her desk is the jacket art for Sandy's new book, The War of Desire
and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age (MIT Press). The book has
burned up the charts, relatively speaking, for such an unapologetically
cerebral piece of prose. It's as eclectic and searching as the fragments of
life she plasters across her office walls. "Not a traditional text, but a
series of intellectual provocations," the blurb on the cover warns us.
Translation: the book is wild - a wickedly playful hot jazz jam session of
ideas and insights into electronically mediated human interactions. It mixes
sociological accounts of the early online BBS communities with anecdotes of
high-tech high jinks at the Atari Lab. It contrasts multiple-personality
syndrome with participating in a MUD and uses the case of a psychiatrist
cross-dressing in cyberspace to raise profound questions about the future of
gender and identity. The more you delve into Sandy Stone's work, the more you
understand why she calls herself a "discourse surfer." She hangs ten and shoots
the curls on the monster waves of hardcore science and high-cultural theory.
Best of all, she takes her readers along for the ride.

Stryker:You've worked in so many fields.
Describe some of your early
neurological work on hearing and vision.

Stone

:I did a series of experiments in
the '60s with chronic implants - ones that stayed in place a long time.
These for me are one of the mostfascinating things I've ever done. I connected
the electrodes implanted in a cat's inner ear to a miniature stereo FM
transmitter attached to its collar. I would let the cat wander around outside
in the fields, then I would go to my receiver and put on the stereo headphones
and "become" the cat. Cats don't hear like humans. Their hearing response curve
is completely different, and they can hear right on up into the ultrasonic
range. So, of course, I wasn't really hearing what a cat hears because my
hearing doesn't extend into the ultrasonic, but I wasn't hearing like a human,
either. At the upper frequencies of my hearing range, everything was so clear
and loud. You could hear every grass blade. You could hear every insect
walking. And, of course, you could hear the field mice off in the distance in
stereo. I came to understand something about feline subjectivity. That for me
was the beginning of my experience with communication prosthetics.

A transspecies experience - that's deep! It reminds me of those scenes
in William Gibson's Neuromancer where the console cowboy is wired into Molly
Million's full perceptual field.

In many ways, the cat with the transmitter and me with the headphones was the
first actualization of what Gibson called "simstim." That experience has never
left me. If the Sandy/cat link were two-way, neither of us would be what we'd
been before. As it was, Sandy became more cat, but the cat didn't become more
Sandy.

Isn't that something like a simple version of the Internet based on
different components - genetically coded carbon molecules instead of
mass-produced silicon chips?

With the Internet, of course, we've opened far more fascinating possibilities.
But the whole discussion is an extrapolation of something that already existed
before either Sandycat or the Internet. Multiple-user virtual communities are
only the latest technological inflections of it. People in close proximity
synchronize the ways they process symbols. On the one hand, this is just a
long-winded way to say "culture." On the other hand, think of the way some old
married couples become so attuned to each other that they finish each other's
sentences. In lifelong dyadic partnerships, when one partner dies the other
rarely survives for more than a year or two. That's something far more complex
and much deeper than what we normally think of as "culture."

-Susan Stryker's book Trans: ChangingSex and other Ecstatic Passages into Postmodernity is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. She can be reached at mulebabyxx@aol.com.